OBSERVATORY

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: January 23, 2001

Was Meat on Early Diets?

Australopithecus robustus, one of the early human predecessors that populated parts of Africa more than a million years ago, has long been thought to have been largely a vegetarian because its flat teeth and huge jaw muscles seemed adapted for chewing woody food like leaves, grasses and roots. When bone tools found at two archaeological sites in South Africa were analyzed a decade ago, the conclusion was that they were used by australopithecines to dig up roots.

But a new analysis of the tools, by researchers in South Africa and France, comes to a different conclusion: these prehumans may have supplemented their diet with termites. Reporting in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said that rather than being used to dig in hard, rocky soil, the tools showed signs of having been used to break up termite mounds.

The researchers examined cast-resin duplicates of the tools using optical and electron microscopes and compared the direction and width of the scratches found on the tips to modern bones that were used experimentally to dig in soil for tubers or in the finer, stoneless soil of termite mounds. The researchers found a strong correlation between the marks on the ancient tools and those on the experimental tools used to dig for termites.

The researchers could not say for sure that it was Australopithecus using the tools, because the sites in question were also home to the remains of members of the Homo genus. But the evidence points slightly more toward Australopithecus than Homo. Breaking up a termite mound causes the insects to swarm, so whichever early hominid it was, the researchers say, would have easily been able to gather up the insects and add a good source of dietary protein and fat.

History of Horses

The domestication of horses was a big event in human history. The horse, after all, became one of the major workhorses of civilization. Archaeological evidence indicates that domestication happened about 6,000 years ago, but just how it happened is something of an open question.

One school of thought holds that horses were domesticated in a few sites through breeding for selected traits, with the horses then being distributed to other regions. The other theory holds that wild horses were captured by many people in many areas, tamed, and eventually bred in captivity as wild stocks were depleted. It's a ''few origins'' versus ''many origins'' argument.

Researchers in Sweden and the United States have now produced strong evidence that the ''many origins'' theory is correct. They did this by examining the mitochondrial DNA in samples from 10 modern breeds. Their work was reported in the journal Science.

Mitochondrial DNA is believed to be inherited from the mother, and how the DNA sequences vary can give an idea of the numbers of lines of descent. If modern horses were descended from a few selectively bred populations the number of lineages would be small.

But the researchers found a large number of lineages and found that the divergence among lineages preceded, by thousands of years, the assumed date of domestication. So early domestic horses were not the result of selective breeding, the researchers say, but rather the result of a more haphazard process over many years.

Disaster States

Florida leads the nation in disastrous weather, with close to $1.6 billion a year in damage from hurricanes, tornadoes and floods.

The 2001 Extreme Weather Sourcebook, sponsored by several federal agencies and the American Meteorological Society, lists Florida at the top in terms of average annual damage since 1955 (in 1999 dollars), followed by Louisiana and Texas. (New York ranks eighth, followed immediately by Connecticut; New Jersey is No. 22.)